Yitzhak Katz

Yitzhak Katz was born in 1901 in Mykolaiv

Yitzhak Katz was born in 1901 in Mykolaiv, in the Russian Empire, to a religious Jewish family. His father, Abraham Katz, was an ordained rabbi. In 1906 the family moved to Alexandria, Egypt, where his father opened a sewing shop and founded a Yiddish theater association.

When his family moved to Cairo in 1912, he stayed in Alexandria with his sister and attended high school, studying painting in the evenings. He later lived in Cairo and wrote a play staged at the Green Theater. He planned to study in Paris, but in 1920 he followed Batsheva Charlap to Palestine and married her.

He worked in Jerusalem as a government clerk and at a travel agency. At the end of 1923 he moved to Tel Aviv, where his home became a meeting place for artists. From 1925 to 1952 he was secretary of the Jaffa regional chamber of commerce, and from 1928 to 1936 he ran the Belgian consulate.

He served as an economic attaché in France and the Benelux countries in 1950 and 1951, and headed the Jewish Agency's economic department in 1953 and 1954. He was also an administrator at Tel Aviv University. From the 1920s he published art criticism in Hebrew newspapers and journals.

Katz died in 1991. His archive went to the Information Center for Israeli Art at the Israel Museum.